Internet Watch reports, IE7日本語版、自動更新よる配布開始は「2008年2月13日」 (Japanese), that Microsoft Japan will push out the automatic upgrade to IE7 to Japanese users of IE6 on Feb. 13th, 2008. (The schedule was actually announced by Microsoft Japan back in May of 2007.) I checked to make sure that Feb. 13th, 2008 is not a Friday (it is a Wednesday.)

It’s interesting to see how long Microsoft Japan has delayed the automatic upgrade to IE7. The English version came out in Nov. of 2006 and it’s almost 1.5 years later that the Japanese version will be pushed out to the majority of existing Japan-based XP/Vista owners. I have a hunch they’ve used this time to work with Japanese web sites/services to update Japanese websites to support IE7. Why the Japanese launch is a full 3 months behind other locales is probably an interesting story we’ll never hear from the Microsoft Japan IE team.

Just today, the IE team in Redmond promised us an IE8 Beta in the first half of 2008. So just as Japanese users are getting introduced to IE7, they’ll have the IE8 Beta to enjoy as well.

Steve Yegge (of Google) writes a lengthy post “Code’s Worst Enemy” on the various merits and demerits of various programming languages. He winds up endorsing Mozilla Rhino for the projects he is and will be working on in the future. This is great news for Rhino as well as for the JavaScript programming community.

As it happens, though, I’ve settled on Rhino. I’ll be working with the Rhino dev team to help bring it up to spec with EcmaScript Edition 4. I believe that ES4 brings JavaScript to rough parity with Ruby and Python in terms of (a) expressiveness and (b) the ability to structure and manage larger code bases. Anything it lacks in sugar, it more than makes up for with its optional type annotations. And I think JavaScript (especially on ES4 steroids) is an easier sell than Ruby or Python to people who like curly braces, which is anyone currently using C++, Java, C#, JavaScript or Perl. That’s a whooole lot of curly brace lovers. I’m nothing if not practical these days.
…When you’re ready to make the switch, well, Mozilla Rhino will be ready for you. It works great today and will be absolutely outstanding a year from now. And I sincerely hope that JRuby, Jython and friends will also be viable Java alternatives for you as well. You might even try them out now and see how it goes.

This is in stark comparison to the Netherlands, who recently announced that the Dutch Government will preferentially use open source software and any one in the government who requires the usage of closed-source software will need to explain the necessity. It’s fascinating and encouraging to see Europe embrace OSS even at the highest levels of government.

For those of you who use Flickr.com, the popular photo sharing service, the new uploading application, Flickr Uploadr 3.0, is based on Mozilla’s XULrunner platform and is now open source software, as well as being cross-platform, and available in 8 languages (sadly not Japanese, but in Korean and traditional Chinese.)

But I don’t think I’ve seen many “pan-Asian” web conferences so far. So I think we could imagine a conference where things like these are happening…

– Keynote speeches being made by well-known tech entrepreneurs in China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hongkong, Taiwan, etc. as well as a host of internationally renowned speakers.

– An international launchpad where new ventures in Asia can showcase their newest products (Think TechCrunch 40 or the Demo). English translation will be provided – we all know English-speaking skills and product-development skills are two different sets of skills. VCs are more than welcome to join.

– Panel discussion between professionals from different countries where different web cultures and business environments can be compared, perhaps in search of some universal success strategies across the Asian web industry.

I think language is one hurdle but I think English will end up being the defacto language of such an event. More importantly is location, sponsorship and organization. That will be the challenge. Japan only had a “Web 2.0” event in 2007 (many years after the first “Web 2.0” event in the US) and the Japan event was very different than any of the US ones.

I would be happy to see such an event happen and would do what I could to make it happen, but I think finding an appropriate site, an organizer and anchor sponsors is critical (and a full-time job for a team of people.) Even if discussions started today, 2008 may be too early for such an event (if the goal is to make a very large event.) I look forward to such an event but I don’t see any of the current incumbents (event organization incumbents) stepping forward for such an event.

Last week about 50 of the Mozilla Korea community members got together last week to share their thoughts on what Firefox means to them over dinner. Channy Yun, who is the lead localizer for Firefox in Korea and also works tirelessly to support the Mozilla community in Korea organized the dinner and shared with me some photos. Channy said,

“attendees introduced themselves with a ‘For me Firefox is [ ].’ panel. Each person explained the relationship between Firefox and oneself. And we had a late dinner together. I explained how to join the Mozilla community activities and Mozilla’s open web mission.”

Thanks to Channy for his tireless efforts to make Firefox the best browser for Korean users and thanks to the Korean Mozilla Community for sharing your thoughts on what makes Firefox important for you. The browser market is quite challenging in Korea for historical and technical issues, but it’s clear that the Mozilla community is active and engaged.

Earlier this week, Mozilla Japan announced a new partnership with a leading portal site in Japan, NTT Resonant’s “goo” portal. “goo” has been a supporter of Firefox in Japan for some time and a few months ago they came to us with a proposal for a new distribution of Firefox to support their “goo Green Label” search service, which donates a portion of the funds generated by the search advertising to an environmental not-for-profit. Mozilla Japan was honored to work with NTT Resonant on such a project and we debuted the Mozilla Firefox for goo Green Label last Tuesday. If you are using Firefox currently, you can try the goo Green Label add-on for Firefox in English. It involves an eco/green theme, a new search plugin, and a small tree next to the home button that grows with the number of searches you do.

Nagai-san and Sawamura-san of NTT Resonant, who were instrumental in making this project happen, were also kind enough to be interviewed about this project after the press launch (unfortunately only in Japanese.)Firefox と仲間たち 第 3 回 永井孝久さん・澤村正樹さん (NTT レゾナント)

The Japanese press was very interested in this new partnership and drew parallels between how people contribute to open source software and how others contribute to environmental efforts or projects. We were lucky enough to have over 20 articles written about the event online and at least 3 newspaper articles as well.

For those of you who remember the Firefox Flicks contest, Mozilla Japan has been working with the artists’ network Loftwork and Sony’s video hosting service eyeVio to create a similar contest in Japan: the Get Firefox Video Award. The contest opened at the beginning of October and registration closed on Dec. 10th.

For those of you who don’t read Japanese, I’ll provide you a few links so you can get to the parts of the site that have the videos you may want to see.

The video gallery link is the fourth one on the left menu from the top. This brings you a page of all of the videos in a random order.

From the top tab, you can select also “video” or “cg/anime” which sorts the videos into those two types. Hayashi-san, who runs Loftwork, had told me to expect more computer-generated or animated videos when we were planning this contest and lo and behold, she was right!

On the gallery page, underneath the top tabs are 4 tabs (from left to right) for “random”, “popular”, “new” and “home town”. So you can sort the videos via these secondary tabs.

On each individual video page, there’s a small green box with a fox paw mark. That’s our voting button. If you like the video, please click the button to vote for it. Once you vote, you’ll be able to leave a comment on the video in the comment box. You can’t comment until you vote. We are giving away an award for most popular video so please do vote/comment for your favorite videos.

Finally, we’ll be announcing the winner of the video contest next week on December 18th at a party in Tokyo’s club Super-Deluxe. If you’re in Tokyo and would like to attend, please register from the home page.

If you’d like to promote our contest on your blog or website, please use one of the icons or blog widgets that we’ve provide at our “spread” page.